The Copper Beech of Schoonoord

Schoonoord holds roughly a thousand species of plants and trees inside a garden barely bigger than a football pitch, and this copper beech is one of only two survivors from the day its original layout went in, sometime between 1860 and 1870. Wikipedia separately mentions a '200-year-old beech' among the park's notable trees, but that figure predates the garden itself by decades, so it more likely rounds a different tree or repeats an unverified figure than describes this one. The register's own planting band puts this beech at roughly 155 to 165 years, a more specific and better-sourced number, so that is the one used here, flagged for the conflict rather than resolved by guessing. The register calls the trunk '125 cm dik', the Dutch word for thickness rather than circumference, which most likely means a diameter near that figure and a girth closer to 390 cm, though the record does not say so directly and it has not been measured independently. Twenty metres tall, crown eighteen metres across, standing beside the garden's pond on a narrow footpath near the Westzeedijk boundary. Schoonoord is a former country estate, a protected Rijksmonument since 2000, owned by the Stichting Schoonoord and open to the public since 1973 after decades as a private garden. Bees, koi and a resident tawny owl share the grounds. Two ancient Lebanon cedars from the same original planting stand nearby.